Social scientists have hypothesised that new social contacts arise preferentially between those who currently share neighbours: friends-of-friends have an increased chance of becoming friends. Such a triadic closure eect was quantied through an evolving network model in [Bistability through triadic closure, P. Grindrod, D. J. Higham and M. C. Parsons, Internet Mathematics, to appear]. Here we show how this mathematical model can be used in order to develop a statistical test for the presence of triadic closure in a large scale evolving network. This new tool has the potential to help our understanding of online social interaction and also to predict future network behaviour
